Like most of the US allies, Australia is caught between a rock and a hard place.

The rock is Israel’s intransigence and the implacability of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s coalition partners.

The hard place is the immense suffering of the Palestinian and, now, the Lebanese people.

“Acceptance” of Israel’s extreme brutality in the assertion of its right to national security and “concern” at the slaughter of 30,000 non-combatants, including over 10,000 children, are irreconcilable.

Trying to steer between the two results in the impotence and timidity that distinguishes the procession of state leaders and foreign ministers now talking at the UN General Assembly.

Its repeated claims to indispensability and world leadership notwithstanding, the US is as impotent as its allies.

Despite its repeated efforts at brokering, it has been little more than a bystander since 1948.

Netanyahu dismisses President Joe Biden’s suggestions and Anthony Blinken’s advice with scorn, preferring instead to take the Middle East to the brink of war, sure in his belief that the US is powerless to apply sanctions, cut off arms and demand a ceasefire.

Israel is certain that the US will not permit it to fail.

But driving Hamas and, now, Hezbollah further underground – literally – while reducing neighbourhoods to rubble will only increase the desperation of the Palestinian and Lebanese people and encourage further acts of terrorism and missile assault by both.

It will thus diminish rather than strengthen Israel’s long-term security.

Day by day, the problems are compounding and the situation is worsening. Iran is moving towards mobilisation. And Russia is sitting by, enjoying the misery of all parties as it prosecutes its war in Ukraine.

It is a case where sleepwalking and rushing headlong are the same thing.

Biden is in an historically unique position to bring matters to a head. Out of the presidential race and with nothing to lose, he can play the statesman with everything to gain. More than any other world leader, he can insist that the UN do its job by bringing the conflicting parties together.

Name calling and philosophical debates about what is terrorism and what is not (the state of Israel was born out of terrorism, it should be remembered) cannot be allowed to prevent a ceasefire and a conference of all concerned parties. “We do not negotiate with terrorists” is simply an excuse for catastrophe.

Historically, sustained diplomacy has provided some of the truly powerful instances of statecraft creating a better world.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the disaster of the 30 Years War that saw Europe depopulated by over 30 per cent, brought the warring parties together in a fundamental realignment of Europe’s way of doing business.

Curiously, the papacy filled the role of facilitator to which the US might now aspire. It would be a substantial legacy.

The 1945 creation of the UN, in which Australia played more than a bit part, created new hope from the rubble of WWII.

Sure, the UN needs rejuvenation and the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council need re-consideration, as Penny Wong intimated in recent remarks.

But it remains an available resource that lends authority to multilateral negotiation, the most demanding form of diplomacy as Cardinal Richelieu discovered.

In its own way, the formation of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 ended a period of tension and confrontation between the five principal neighbouring states of south-east Asia. Dismissed by some high-handed “realist” commentators as little more than a talk-shop, ASEAN has succeeded in maintaining the peace and stability of the region for over half a century, and invested in levels of prosperity that were unimaginable.

The establishment of the European community in 1957 and, more importantly, the European Union in 1993, with its own parliament to transform agreement into binding legislation, demonstrates what states that are not naturally aligned can do when human security and the security of the citizens becomes the central performance indicator of national security.

It represents the transformation of statecraft into supra-statecraft. Although Germany foots a major part of the bill, it evidently finds this contribution infinitely more attractive than its own repeated demolition and consequent reconstruction, its twofold fate in the 20th century.

Perhaps what the Middle East needs most of all is a supra-state solution to its inter-state problems.

And to that end, it desperately needs leaders of imagination and good-will to lead people away from armed aggression to engaged and sustained diplomacy. Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia may need to foot most of the bill, though, like Germany, all would find the investment significantly less expensive than war.

While no one should underestimate the difficulty of building a peace between such ideologically opposed antagonists, what option is there apart from mutual destruction and the threat of nuclear weapons use?

And in this, the global community has just as much interest as the belligerents themselves.

Republished from The Canberra Times, October 05, 2024

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The sudden cancellation of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s visit to the US may be related to his complicated relationship with Israel’s PM Netanyahu, suggests Tel Aviv-based international relations expert Dr. Simon Tsipis.

According to Tsipis, Netanyahu is afraid that Gallant may be gunning for him and would immediately start plotting against him upon arriving in the US.

"Netanyahu is paranoid, he has a king syndrome, a god complex,” says Tsipis. “He constantly fears that someone might overthrow or supplant him. This paranoia of his grows more acute with each passing day. He sees traitors everywhere, he sees enemies inside his inner circle.”

Seeing how the potential Israeli strike on Iran was the very issue Gallant and Austin were supposed to discuss in the US, Netanyahu basically ended up “holding hostage the entire Middle East, including Israel’s population and Iranian society,” argues Tsipis.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Netanyahu is essentially trying to blackmail the US by threatening to start a major conflict right on the eve of the US presidential election, the expert adds.

“The relations between the US and Netanyahu are quite strained. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can hold the election normally if there is a big war raging in the Middle East,” Tsipis explains. “This is Netanyahu’s biggest leverage and the primary instrument of blackmail.”

The closer the US election nears, the more unhinged Netanyahu gets and the more “outrageous actions” he performs, Tsipis notes.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20241009/netanyahus-god-complex-caused-cancellation-of-israeli-defense-chiefs-visit-to-us---expert-1120489318.html

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On the One-Year Anniversary of October 7, It is Clear We Were Not Told The Truth

 Jeremy Kuzmarov

In an impassioned speech before the U.S. Congress in June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “like December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, October 7 is a date that will forever live in infamy.”

In the official version touted by Netanyahu, Hamas fighters on October 7 breached the Israeli security wall and attacked the Tribe of Nova music festival and surrounding kibbutzim, killing 1,139 Israelis, including 815 civilians. Israel responded by launching an all-out war.

People skeptical of the official narrative questioned how Hamas could have breached Israel’s security wall when it was among the most heavily guarded in the world and connected to sensors.

They also wondered how Israeli military forces were not immediately mobilized to rout the Hamas fighters who had come in on hang-gliders and were armed with mostly rudimentary weapons.

Even a mainstream news network like ABC aired a special report about a team of female IDF officers stationed near the border who had reported suspicious activity to their superiors days before the October 7 attack only to have their report ignored. Most of the female IDF officers were slaughtered when their base was overrun on October 7

After October 7, Dr. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, wrote:

“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles. In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.” 

Giraldi’s perspective is reinforced in a new documentary about October 7, narrated and edited by John Hankey.

The film shows footage of two purported Mossad agents opening the gates to the electric fence to Hamas fighters to allow them to enter Israel and carry out the terrorist attacks of October 7.

Additionally, the film suggests that: a) Mossad knew in advance of the October 7 attack and may have helped to plan it; b) IDF officers were deliberately withdrawn to allow the Hamas invaders to enter the country and carry out their attacks; c) female IDF soldiers who reported on Hamas activities were deliberately ignored and then allowed to be killed; and d) many of the killings of Israeli civilians were carried out by IDF soldiers as part of the deception operation, whose purpose was to inflame Israeli opinion in support of war.[1]

The notion that the October 7 attacks were a surprise is contradicted by advance reports that the IDF high command had received days and hours before, and by the launching of rockets or fireworks by Hamas seen in Jerusalem in the early morning hours of October 7.

One parallel with 9/11 is that there were abnormal stock market trades and manipulations going on just before October 7, which indicates advance knowledge of the attacks by elements of the Israeli and probably U.S. intelligence establishments.

The Netanyahu government had long supported Hamas financially, viewing it as an asset that could weaken Palestinian support for the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and create unrest in the occupied territory that would enable Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy.[2]

Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, is quoted in the film stating that Hamas was a terrorist organization that was not recognized by the UN Security Council; as such, the Israelis could not negotiate a peace deal with it, which they did not want to do.

A side purpose of the Tribe of Nova massacre, according to Hankey, was to allow for the slaughter of Israeli leftists/peaceniks who were attending the Tribe of Nova music festival, which was a Woodstock-type festival for peaceniks whom the Israeli hard right and Mossad hate.

Lawyers for survivors of the massacre are currently suing the Israeli government because, they say, the government knew in advance of the attacks and did nothing to protect festival attendees. The festival was even moved up to the Gaza border a few days before, even though it was known this would be dangerous.

Hankey shows footage from Israeli Apache helicopters which fired on the cars of festival goers fleeing the scene and others fleeing by foot, suggesting that many festival goers may have been killed by the IDF.

In Hankey’s assessment, the incinerated cars could not have been burned by Hamas. He believes that Mossad later staged the crime scene to make it look like festival goers had been attacked in their cars by terrorists.

While difficult to corroborate, the CIA and Mossad specialize in false-flag operations/deception operations where they carry out crimes and then plant evidence to blame their enemy, so this could have followed in that pattern.[3]

At the outset of the film, Hankey features interviews with two IDF whistleblowers incensed by the Israeli government’s conduct.

One, a male who served on the Gaza border, stated that “Israel is probably the most advanced surveillance state in the world and the Gaza border the most heavily surveilled in the world. Do you know how long it would take for an Israeli attack helicopter to be activated and blow up any one of the Hamas tractors or pickup trucks [that breached the fence]? Less than five minutes. It could have been a matter of five minutes before the whole thing was upended. I’m sorry, that’s an inside job.”

Another, a female Israeli army intelligence officer whom Hankey characterizes as the “Israeli Snowden,” stated that the border with Gaza is “guarded 24/7 not only by patrol cars and cameras but also by the electric fence and lasers that are activated by alarm. Nobody can cross the fence. You cannot cross unless you had help from inside. This operation [on October 7] was not made by Hamas. The plan is to flatten Gaza. Let’s tell the truth.”

Truth is not, of course, a hallmark of the U.S. and Israeli governments, which clearly distorted what happened on October 7, 2023—like many other events before and since.

The ultimate aim was not only to flatten Gaza but to trigger a regional war that would allow for the long-held dream of attacking Iran and over-throwing its government, which has been considered an enemy since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Netanyahu’s comparisons with Pearl Harbor are quite apt because the U.S. government lied about those attacks, which provided a pretext for another genocidal war in which two atomic bombs were deployed against a dehumanized population.[4]

The big lie about Pearl Harbor, sustained over the last 80+ years, is that the Japanese attack was unprovoked when the Roosevelt administration had a) engaged in a large-scale naval buildup in the Asia-Pacific; b) allowed U.S. pilots to fly Guomindang aircraft against Japanese troops in China; and c) imposed a crippling oil embargo on Japan that ex-President Herbert Hoover had warned would lead to war.

Additionally, the Roosevelt administration allowed Americans in Hawaii to be sitting ducks, like the Netanyahu government Israelis, by removing U.S. ships from the West Coast in what was known as the “vacant sea.” Further, it failed to adequately warn commanders in Hawaii (Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter C. Short) of the impending attack, which was known about because U.S. cryptologists had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code.

Early in the morning of December 7, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall received information about the impending attack, which he sent to Kimmel and Short via regular courier rather than by scrambler phone, ensuring that the news arrived too late.

The deception over Pearl Harbor was reminiscent of earlier deception regarding the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania that provided a pretext for U.S. intervention in World War I 23 months later.

In that case, a British commission uncovered that the Lusitania—carrying more than 100 American passengers from the U.S. to Europe (over 1,000 died overall)—was rigged with explosives, though the destruction of the ship was blamed on Germany.

Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, withheld rescue boats to maximize the number of deaths. The aim was to generate enough outrage for the U.S. public to want to go to war against Germany.[5]

Evidence indicates that Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted the same strategy of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in sacrificing the lives of his own people in order to arouse enough anger to generate support for war.

Roosevelt and Churchill are today regarded as national heroes in their respective countries, though Netanyahu is likely to go down in history as a villain, along with his American sponsors. This is because the Israelis have failed to earn a heroic victory against Gaza and have horrified much of the world with the atrocities that they have committed.

1. 
   

   The film features an interview with an Israeli hostage, Yasmin Porat, who states that Israeli tanks shelled homes holding hostages in Kibbutz Be’eria where 112 Israelis were killed. When asked whether terrorists had killed people in the kibbutz, Porat said people were killed in crossfire—that is in firing by IDF troops targeting Hamas. The Times of Israel on July 8 reported on an IDF probe, carried out by Major General Mickey Edelstein, a former commander of the Gaza division, which acknowledged that an IDF tank fired on the home of kibbutz resident Pesi Cohen, where Hamas terrorists allegedly held 14 hostages—including Porat. See Michael Bachner, “IDF officer recounts ordering tank fire on Be’eri home during hostage standoff on Oct. 7,” The Times of Israel, December 23, 2023. In an October 11 article in Ha’aretz, Nir Hasson and Eden Solomon interviewed the IDF deputy commander of an armored reserve battalion who described how he and his tank unit “fought inside the kibbutz, from house to house, with the tanks. “We had no choice,” he said. Another Be’eri resident, Tuval, told Nir Hasson about IDF shelling of houses on October 9 in a calculated military operation. Anonymous Contributor, “A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,” Mondoweiss, October 22, 2023. Many stories spread in the media about rapes by Hamas, pregnant women having their bellies sliced open, and burning of children were proven to be false. The latter were reminiscent of stories spread about German occupiers in Belgium during World War I that was used to whip up war fever in Western countries. For discussion of the latter, see Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, rev ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/10/07/on-the-one-year-anniversary-of-october-7-it-is-clear-we-were-not-told-the-truth/

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